“You’re not trying to figure things out; you’re trying to enter into what’s there.” –Eugene Peterson
Last week included a day left uncovered by The Kid’s shadow therapist; she was away and the backups were otherwise occupied. So I made the executive decision to call it a “Mommy and James Day.”
“I’m spending some time with my mum today,” he told everyone from the shopkeeper to friends, and we started at the oval next to the beach, he on his bike and I on my feet, one of us alternately chasing the other, my “run” more of a “bouncing around on my calves” until he transferred to the playground and I jogged in circles around it, periodically calling his name and waving while he kept watch for my location. This will be the illustration they one day use for helicopter parenting, but whatever. #mylifemychoices.
After that we headed to the indoor swimming pool, where we each grabbed a noodle and bobbed around on them until his teeth chattered (Australians have a different definition of “heated pool” than Southerners do) and we stopped by the house before moving on to the mall and its cinema. There we watched a crappy animated film while scarfing down McDonald’s and popcorn. Success.
Today, the day his therapist was meant to return to school, she sits stuck in the snow in New Zealand and I sit under the shade outside his classroom, typing on my computer and listening out for signs of distress. One of the learning support teachers “happens” to be in his classroom today, and she is lovely, and so I’m sweating slightly less than I would be. I didn’t break the news to him until after we’d dropped off Little Brother and I snuck my laptop into TK’s backpack and we headed out the door, walking the couple of blocks while I chose my words carefully. They were littered with phrases like “red toy shop after school,” “give it a go,” “I believe in you,” and “trust me.”
Oh, that last one. That one was uttered by both of us: he meaning it in the “I can’t do this so take me home” sense, I meaning it in the “I could be totally screwing up here but I’m going to fake it for your sake and we’ll see how we come out on the other side PS has anyone seen my Xanax” sense.
The words we choose leave other ones excluded; often we opt out of language altogether. That’s what TK did for the first four years of his life, his silence belying the intricate thought process underneath the surface, language being measured and analysed and gathered until he was ready to present it, whole and sure. Now I find myself constantly measuring my words, typing them here and doling them out to the boys, confidently and shakily in both settings.
(I take a break to text a friend about what I’m hearing from the classroom, the shouts of the teacher and yet the absence of distress from my little fighter within; the harbour glistens below me and I am suspended in the tension that words can assuage but not remove; all this and I’ve sworn off wine tonight and tomorrow. #jesustakethewheel.)
It occurs to me that words have been the great measuring stick of my life, my most constant currency and signifier of meaning, but they are far from its full embodiment. Not the little-L words anyway, I think, as the teacher screeches for the children to write their words and I’m trying to capture the whole thing here both for posterity and therapy.
I am meters away from one of the biggest chunks of my heart and I need more than words to tether us. There are more than words that tether us.
And yet they are so much. They have to be; sometimes they feel like all we have. “Use your words,” I tell TK and LB when they are reduced by their emotions to puddles of tears on the floor, arms flailing at some transgression the other has committed. TK’s therapists call this functional communication: giving him the tools that provide an option other than melting down. This morning, stuck in traffic and already anxious about what lay ahead, I pounded the steering wheel, my own functional communication reduced to a meltdown, and TK asked it from the backseat: “Are you angry?” This recognition of an emotion that, I see now, he has learned from me to name, and just like that the student becomes the teacher. “I’m frustrated,” I respond, then attempt to describe the car that has backed us all up by trying to turn from the wrong lane, and the words don’t fix it but they do help defuse: I remember that I don’t have to hold everything myself, that I can share.
We’ve been reading Psalms to the kids at bedtime because I remember The Mom reading them to The Sis and me as we grew up, and the words took root somewhere deeper than I realised because it turns out I still carry them with me. I want this for the boys, and I tell them that this part of the Bible, it’s poems. Poems written by people who knew no better way to talk to God about how they felt, and one day I’ll also tell them what I’ve learned about the words of poetry: that they are the opposite of summary; that they are the recognition of how little we can control ourselves and the surrender to the mystery that life really is. Not the figuring out, but the entering in.
And words can’t describe it, but poetry can try, these moments that populate our days now: the Aussie-American hybrid that the boys are because we said the word yes. The “I love you”s that the boys utter so frequently now. The sound of LB’s voice as he quotes the psalm along with me, his memory already at work. What TK’s Scripture teacher tells me–that they read The Lord’s Prayer in class and he raised his hand: “But what does it mean?” The poems at night and the prayers in the car and the exit from the classroom in the afternoon that, for so many reasons, has become a victory walk–that will be one this afternoon. How much more of it than I ever expected has turned out to be poetry.